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Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 1, 2026
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 23, 2026
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Code search is an integral part of a developer’s workflow. In 2015, researchers published a paper reflecting on the code search practices at Google of 27 developers who used the internal Code Search tool. That paper had first-hand accounts for why those developers were using code search and highlighted how often and in what situations developers were searching for code. In the past decade, much has changed in the landscape of developer support. New languages have emerged, artificial intelligence (AI) for code generation has gained traction, auto-complete in the IDE has gotten better, Q&A forums have increased in popularity, and code repositories are larger than ever. It is worth considering whether those observations from almost a decade ago have stood the test of time. In this work, inspired by the prior survey about the Code Search tool, we run a series of three surveys with 1,945 total responses and report overall Code Search usage statistics for over 100,000 users. Unlike the prior work, in our surveys, we include explicit success criteria to understand when code search is meeting their needs, and when it is not. We dive further into two common sub-categories of code search effort: when its users are looking for examples and when they are using code search alongside code review. We find that Code Search users continue to use the tool frequently and the frequency has not changed despite the introduction of AI-enhanced development support. Users continue to turn to Code Search to find examples, but the frequency of example-seeking behavior has decreased. More often than before, users access the tool to learn about and explore code. This has implications for future Code Search support in software development.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available June 19, 2026
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 23, 2026
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Software testing is a critical skill for computing students, but learning and practicing testing can be challenging, particularly for beginners. A recent study suggests that a lightweight testing checklist that contains testing strategies and tutorial information could assist students in writing quality tests. However, students expressed a desire for more support in knowing how to test the code/scenario. Moreover, the potential costs and benefits of the testing checklist are not yet examined in a classroom setting. To that end, we improved the checklist by integrating explicit testing strategies to it (ETS Checklist), which provide step-by-step guidance on how to transfer semantic information from instructions to the possible testing scenarios. In this paper, we report our experiences in designing explicit strategies in unit testing, as well as adapting the ETS Checklist as optional tool support in a CS1.5 course. With the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey responses and lab assignment submissions generated by students, we discuss students' engagement with the ETS Checklists. Our results suggest that students who used the checklist intervention had significantly higher quality in their student-authored test code, in terms of code coverage, compared to those who did not, especially for assignments earlier in the course. We also observed students' unawareness of their need for help in writing high-quality tests.more » « less
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